Flavors of Power

The oboe gave its A, and the orchestra rose to meet it in a long silver shimmer that Celeste felt through the velvet rail before she properly heard it, as the old wood beneath the upholstery hummed against her gloved palms.

Below the chairman’s box, the house rustled like a field settling after wind as programs folded and a last cough rose from the aisle seats, while the scent of white peonies banked along the grand tier drifted up sweet beneath the lights.

Two thousand people had given up their Friday night to watch swans, and roughly a third of them were watching her.

She obliged them, tipping her chin a degree toward the parterre to smile at the Hallorans in Box Eleven before lifting two fingers to old Mrs. Adair, who had worn the same emerald parure to every opening since the Carter administration and fully intended to be buried in it.

As she settled back and crossed her ankles, the silk of her gown fell in one clean line to the carpet. Neil had chosen it in July, in Paris, from a rail of fifteen, while she drank coffee in an armchair as the fitter pinned it to her in the mirror. She had allowed it only because it was, irritatingly, the right one.

The earrings were her choice.

“Pearls,” Neil said behind her.

She had not heard the door, because she never did; he’d had its hinges oiled in his first season as chairman. His cologne reached her before anything else could, vetiver and cedar over a smokiness that recalled a coat left too long beside a fire.

Then his palm settled at the nape of her neck, warm and unhurried, while his thumb came to rest exactly where the clasp of a necklace would have been, had she worn one.

“Pearls,” she agreed.

“On opening night.” He made it sound like a lapse in hygiene.

“Swan Lake is a white ballet, darling.” She kept her eyes on the curtain, where the gold fringe stirred in some draft from the wings. “I’m being thematic.”

“You’re being looked at.” His thumb traced one slow line down the side of her throat until every fine hair along her arm rose beneath the glove. “The Fischer diamonds are in the safe.”

“And they’ll be so well rested for the spring gala.”

He did not laugh. He never laughed at that one, which was precisely why she kept making it.

The house lights chose that moment to sink. As the conductor stepped onto the podium to applause, Neil bent until his mouth hovered beside her ear, and his breath stirred the pearl there so that it knocked softly against her jaw.

“Take them off at intermission,” he said, straightening before he returned to his chair.

Celeste turned her face to the stage in time to watch the curtain rise on the palace garden.

It was a good first act. The corps was clean and the court scene glittered, but the house was waiting for Toni, and when she finally came on for the pas de trois in pale blue chiffon, she carried her chin as if no one had ever once told her no.

It was accurate casting. Celeste had watched a stage manager try it in 2021, and the woman now worked in Ohio.

During her variation, Toni’s eyes flicked to the chairman’s box on a turn so quick that nobody else in the house could have caught it, and Celeste answered with their old signal, one gloved finger touched to the pearl at her left ear.

Beside her, Neil watched the stage and not her, which meant he was watching her.

In the second act, twenty-four swans shivered in through a low bank of fog across a lake that was painted in blues so deep they looked wet, and the house sank into the particular hush of a rich audience deciding to be moved.

While Irina Voss folded herself into Siegfried’s arms as Odette, Celeste’s gaze drifted along the horseshoe to Box Four, which sat dark across the auditorium as it had for three seasons, with its chairs turned to the wall behind a dulled brass number.

She looked at it no longer than it took to confirm it was still empty.

Twice. Twice was prudent.

When the curtain came down on the lake, intermission carried them into the salon behind the box, a narrow jewel of a room lined in oxblood silk, where a single gilt mirror had worn from gold to rose at the corners after generations of women had steadied themselves there to fix their lipstick.

Through the closed door, the grand tier went on without them in a muffle of ice against crystal, where someone’s husband was explaining Tchaikovsky to someone else’s wife. Celeste had barely reached the mirror, holding a coupe that she had no plans to drink, when Neil’s reflection rose behind hers.

He stood taller by a head, and the sconce light caught the silver at his temples as he relieved her of the champagne, setting it on the mantel without looking where it went, so that both his hands were free by the time they found her ears.

Then he unhooked the left pearl.

He took his time over it. The post eased from her lobe so slowly that she felt each separate millimeter of its leaving, yet his eyes never left hers in the glass while he worked at her as he worked the old locks at the villa, whose mechanisms he had learned by touch years ago and still enjoyed proving.

When the right pearl followed, it went into his breast pocket beside the first, and his hand came to rest on her bare shoulder, heavy as a seal pressed into wax.

“You looked lovely in them,” he said. “At home.”

Celeste smiled at his reflection, accepting it as a compliment, since by his arithmetic it was one.

Sebastien had run Neil’s affairs for as long as Celeste had known either of them, and he never knocked. He came in carrying a flat velvet case as though he had been standing in the corner all along and had simply chosen this moment to be noticed.

He held it out, and when Neil opened it one-handed, the Fischer diamonds lay inside on black satin like a cold white river that caught the sconce light and threw it back sharper.

The moment Neil raised them to her throat, the chill of the platinum stole a single breath from her, and in the mirror she watched him smile. Seb leaned in to murmur something at his ear, too low to reach her.

Neil’s fingers stopped on the clasp.

The pause lasted less than a second before the catch closed at her nape with a small, decisive click, after which Neil smoothed the necklace flat against her collarbone with his fingertips.

“Thank you, Sebastien,” he said, and by the time the door eased shut on its oiled hinges, Seb was gone.

Somewhere beyond the door, a familiar laugh climbed over the murmur of the tier, and in the mirror Neil adjusted the center stone a quarter inch to the left.

“Smile,” he said. “The Adairs are coming by.”

She smiled, and the Adairs came by. Mrs. Adair admired the diamonds, managing to suggest that she had once owned better ones, while Celeste admired the emeralds and managed not to mention where they had been pawned in 1987, after which everyone parted on a flurry of air kisses.

Back at the rail as the lights went down, with the diamonds taking on the heat of her skin, Celeste could admit that the pearls had been a mistake.

It had therefore been an excellent mistake, because Neil had spent two full acts thinking about her ears instead of looking across the horseshoe at Box Four. She would have done it again. In a sense, she had planned it.

She was almost sure she had planned it.

The third act opened on the ballroom, red and gold with its princesses in a row, until the lights shifted colder for the Black Swan, who swept on in a tutu like spilled ink. Irina Voss, who had been Odette an act ago, danced Odile the way a knife is thrown.

When the coda began and the orchestra swelled into the fouettés, Neil’s hand settled on Celeste’s knee, where his fingers began to tap the count through the silk.

One. Two. Three.

Irina whipped around on her supporting leg while the working leg lashed out and in, out and in, and her head snapped back to the same point in the black of the house on every turn until the whole theater went still around her.

At sixteen, Celeste’s gloved hands closed around each other in her lap, because Irina had begun to travel. By twenty-four, the pointe shoe had carried Irina a foot downstage and then more, toward the lip of the stage and the orchestra pit below, yet Neil’s fingers never altered their tempo.

Celeste counted with him under her breath and did not blink.

Thirty. Thirty-one.

On thirty-two, Irina closed into a clean fifth an arm’s length from the pit with her chin high, and the house came up out of its seats in a roar that shook the chandelier.

Through all of it, Neil’s hand stayed where it was, as steady on the final count as on the first. He did not doubt things. He arranged them, and the world, which knew its place, caught up.

Celeste clapped until her palms stung through the kid leather, allowing herself only the briefest glance at the dark oblong of Box Four.

After the swans had drowned beautifully in their lake and the final curtain had fallen on a stage buried in roses, the car was waiting on Columbus Avenue with its engine running, while rain beaded on its black roof and the lights of the plaza smeared gold across the windows.

The driver held the door for her, and she slid onto leather that was already warm. Neil had the seats heated from the first night of the autumn season until the last snow, because in the first autumn of their marriage she had mentioned, once, that they were cold.

The moment he settled beside her and the door closed, the city became a soft hiss beyond the glass.

He said nothing for three blocks. Instead, he drew her left hand into his lap to work the glove free one fingertip at a time, so that the leather gave in small whispering tugs, while Celeste watched the rain streak the window where his reflection lay over her own.

“Irina traveled,” Celeste said, mostly to hear something other than the rain.

“Irina finished.” He said it to her glove, still coaxing the leather loose.

“A foot from the pit.”

“A foot is a very long way, if you know where the edge is.” He laid the glove across his knee before turning her bare hand over to press his thumb into the center of her palm, slow and deep, until the ache of all that clapping bloomed and dissolved. “Sebastien had news.”

“I gathered.” She tipped her head back against the leather to watch him through her lashes. “Someone’s dog died?”

“Some gentlemen from the IRS are about to take an interest in the foundation.” He might have been mentioning the weather in Gstaad, for all his thumb changed its rhythm. “Our lawyers will send papers to your office on Monday.”

Outside, a taxi slid past as its brake lights bled red across the wet glass, and Celeste watched it until the red was only a smear at the corner.

“What sort of papers?” She kept her voice where it had been, light and faintly bored, but her hand had gone still in his, and he would have felt it.

Neil lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed the inside of her wrist where her pulse sat just beneath the skin, and she felt his lips curve against it.

“The sort you sign,” he said.